Huck Finn Literary Analysis

“‘Not suitable for trash’ was the opinion of the Concord, Massachussetts, librarians who banned it in 1885. Nearly 130 years since then, this novel has been challenged, defended, banned, expurgated and bowdlerized numerous times by parents, educators, publishers and librarians” (Ruta 1). Attack, defense, and debate over the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, has raged on since its publication. Numerous questionable topics in the novel have caused the widespread banning or censorship of book, especially in libraries. Criticism includes the polarizing culmination of Huckleberry Finn’s exploits. Although the book features unrealistic character regression, Huck Finn’s ending was appropriate because it allocates space for further social commentary on slavery and Romanticism. The seemingly ineffective ending to Huck Finn served to mock or invoke change in the practices of
The king and the duke duplicitously sold away Jim to the Phelps’ for a slight profit while Huck was distracted. During Jim’s breakout from the Phelps’ hut, Huck devised a simple plan of stealing keys from the superstitious slave; Tom, however, proposed a complicated scheme, even wanting “...to saw Jim’s leg off” (Twain 181) instead of simply lifting the bed and removing the chains. Tom reads the exaggerated Romantic novels and develops his ludicrous escape plan using their methods. Tom explains his farcical logic through the Romantic example. Tom wanted to dig under Jim’s cabin of imprisonment with a set of knives, claiming how “...prisoners in... the Castle Deef [sic]” (Twain 184) dug through solid rock in a related situation, which Tom wished to imitate. Though misspelled, Tom references The Count of Monte Cristo as a model of his ambitions. through the ending of Huck Finn, Twain uses Tom to satirize the silly, overzealous, yet popular Romantic